Witches and pardon – Part 2

But I also met many people who were truly capable of dealing with forces that were far beyond my understanding. I saw time being altered, for example. I saw operations without anesthesia, and on one of these occasions (precisely a day that I had woken up with many doubts about man’s unknown power) I placed my finger inside the incision made with a rusty pocket knife. Believe it as you wish – or ridicule it if that is the only way of reading what I am writing – I have seen metal being changed, cutlery twisted, lights shining in the air around me, because somebody said that would happen (and it did). I was almost always with witnesses, generally skeptical. In most cases these witnesses went on being skeptical, always thinking that it was all just a very clever “trick”. Others said it was “the work of the devil”. Finally, a few believed that they were witnessing phenomena that went beyond human comprehension.

I have seen this in Brazil, France, England, Switzerland, Morocco, and Japan. And what happens to most people who manage to, let us say, interfere with the “immutable” laws of nature? Society always considers them as marginal phenomena: if they cannot explain, then they do not exist. The vast majority of these people also fail to understand why they are capable of doing astonishing things. And for fear of being labeled charlatans, they end up suffocated by their own gifts.

None of them are happy. They all await the day when they can be taken seriously. They all await a scientific answer to their own powers (and in my opinion I do not think that is the solution). Many hide their potential and end up suffering – because they could help the world, and they do not manage to. Deep down I feel that that they are also waiting for the “official pardon” for being so different.

Separating the wheat from the chaff, and not growing disheartened by the giant amount of charlatanism, I feel that we should ask ourselves once more: what are we capable of?